The subject matter presented herein generally relates to alternative desktop computing solutions. More particularly, the subject matter relates to centrally managed personal computer (PC) systems networked to one or more storage devices, such as a storage area network (SAN) device.
Businesses are continually concerned with cost savings and security. In the realm of IT costs, businesses are increasingly concerned with the need to reduce the costs of maintaining enterprise PCs. Moreover, businesses seek safe, secure solutions that save money without sacrificing performance. In an effort to meet such needs, various PC manufacturers have introduced thin client focused solutions, so called because the thin client relies in some regard on one or more other computer systems (for example, a SAN) in order to provide traditional PC functionality. Among other features, a thin client focused solution allows for central management and increased security. One such approach has been to virtualize the clients, relying heavily on back end servers. Another approach is the Secure Managed Client (SMC) of Lenovo.
In a diskless environment such as an SMC environment, especially one involving a SAN, an administrator may schedule applications such as antivirus, defragmentation, disk backup, etc., to launch during a predetermined time period regarded as optimal. At times, however, this may well lead to excessive disk IO (input/output) operations at the SAN disk array shared by the network, thereby disrupting performance. Solutions to this and related problems in SMC or other diskless environments have proven elusive.